Homeschooling…Again?!

Hey, it’s the beginning of August, so I guess that means it’s time for Amy to write yet another post on Our Schooling Decisions and Why We Made Them. Sheesh.

For yes, as I have mentioned a couple of times, we are back to some homeschooling around these parts. Here’s the deal:

Older son is staying where he is, in high school. My experience with my kids and my own experience teaching is that the quality of instruction in high school improves in the higher grades, and this looks to be so in this case. A junior, he’ll be taking challenging classes in the areas in which he’s interested and it should be good. Seems to be from what I have seen so far of the course materials (school starts tomorrow) at least. He started working in a grocery store in the spring and should be able to continue through the school year, saving up for…what I’m not sure. But he’ll have full, busy days and will be learning and will be spending his days with good friends. Worth it.

Brief recap of the younger one: in school PK-1st, homeschooled 2nd-5th, then in school last year for 6th. Very smart, self-directed kid. No learning or behavior issues. Just curious, mostly mature, and (this is important) the youngest kid of a 57-year old mom who is…over your weekly folders and gift-wrap.

He has strong interests in history and science, and is a fairly talented musician.

Actually, not “now” but…about three or four months into the experience?

Nothing huge, and I really don’t want to discuss the particulars in a public forum. There’s no point to it. We’ve shared our experiences with the people to whom it might matter, and that’s all that’s important.

And largely what motivated us to stop going to school was the feeling that school was largely an annoying middleman that wanted to dictate our schedules for us.

It’s a deal, it’s a contract, it’s an agreement that you, as student and family, make with educational institutions. It’s an agreement in which, for it to be worth it to you, elements must stay balanced.

As in: Not everything the school is going to ask of me is going to great or even valuable. There are going to be irritating aspects of school. But all of that is balanced by what the school experience gives.

Just like the rest of life, right?

So just as in the rest of life, we make constant cost-benefit analyses. Is the good I’m deriving worth the cost I’m paying?

In terms of my own life with my two remaining kids at home in 2011, I was not ecstatic with institutional education, but was fairly comfortable with the agreement I thought we had reached. After all, I only had a decade or so left, but who’s counting. I’d send cooperative kids in every day and support what they were doing in school. School was then going to do its part: teach the basics, enrich, inspire a little. School was going to do no harm. School, because it was called “Catholic,” was going to be holistically, counter-culturally Catholic. I wasn’t asking school to transform our lives, but I was expecting that school wasn’t going to waste my kids’ time or my money. School would do its thing, and then school would step back and school would get out of the way.

Deal?

Flash forward to 2016. Older kid was doing fine in high school. The younger one really wanted to go to school. He was curious, a little concerned that what he was doing at home wasn’t keep him up to where his peers were…

….and he wanted a more consistent posse of friends. The school his older brother had attended for 8th grade seemed to fit the bill.

And….here we are a year later, with him getting ready for school…at home. No regrets, no bad feelings, and yes, lots of new friends made – friendships that will be sustained through sports and other activities – but just a sort of been there, done that kind of feeling.

(No predictions for 8th grade being made at this point)

There were some specific issues, but the broad issue that I think might be relevant and helpful to others is this:

The dissatisfaction he experienced was not with any specific school, but with the whole concept of curriculum as it plays out in elementary/middle school, period. Anyone who teaches struggles with this, as well.

Let’s put it this way:

There’s this much stuff to learn about:

During the course of a school class, period or even a lifetime, you have time to learn this much of that:

So…

Why learn about – or teach – one fragment rather than another? What governs those choices?

This of course, is the core educational question. What shall we learn and how shall we learn it? It’s not an easy question, especially in a huge, diverse society. It’s why we don’t need a single educational system, but countless schools teaching All The Things in any of the myriad ways or for any of the purposes students want to learn them.

Now, we can and should learn about subjects that we don’t think we need or want to learn about. That’s certainly true. This isn’t an argument for pure interest-driven learning. That produces a whole other type of narrowness and is not, in the end, actually educational.

I’m not a science or math person, academically speaking, but when I think about high school and in which classes I learned the most, I don’t think about English or history. I think about the physics class I took when I was a senior, a class I was required to take, but never would have chosen for myself. It was agony, especially for the first semester, but then, as I was studying for the mid-term, something clicked, and I ended up making an A. That experience of working through something that didn’t come naturally to me was very valuable, but I also learned something about myself – I learned that the more abstract a subject is, the more difficulty I have with it, and I experienced physics as very abstract – it wasn’t as concrete as say, biology had been. I learned this in relation to physics, but then it helped me make sense of a lot of other areas of my life, even at the point in which I was moving towards more advanced studies in religion. I knew that history was where I needed to be, not theology.

So no, I’m not saying that we all should just follow our bliss.

BUT:

Is it absolutely necessary that a “quality” educational system be one in which elementary school students are required to learn, not just how to read and calculate, but the minutiae of all sorts of specific subjects? That they spend an hour a day learning a particular aspect of science or the humanities, are expected to keep learning about it with half an hour of homework almost every day, and are judged, in some sense, on their mastery of this particular way of learning about this particular subject?

When they are 12 years old?

Once you’ve lived and learned in Homeschool Land, particularly if that learning has been facilitated by a loosey-goosey, INFP mother whose favorite thing is rabbit trails of inquiry….you might be able to live with that bargain for a while (I’ll put up with this if the other parts of school balance it out)…but then you might start wondering about it.

You might start wondering if rising at 6:45 and doing all the other School Things and being super tired at the end of the day because of it – too tired to practice your music in the way you want, too tired to spend much time outside, even too tired to read at night….you might start wondering if it’s worth it.

You’ve had some good teachers – even a great one. You’re glad of it. You’re grateful. You’ve made good friends. But….there’s that photography class through the homeschool co-op. And the classes at the science museum. And that writing program at the art museum – that sounds interesting. And the iron-pouring session at the historic furnace site. And you might even be able to start volunteering at the zoo.

The thing is….you like science and history and literature and even math is okay. You read and study about all of that on your own. You learned that you’re not “behind” your peers. At all. You will study scientific and historic topics. It might not be what the curriculum committee of your state has determined all 13-year olds should know…but who cares? Is that really important?

You can be trusted to learn.

And this, I’ve promised.

I’ll trust him to learn.

I wrote before that when I began this homeschool journey…I was convinced I was definitely Hip Unschooling Mom.

Er..no.

First, I had an older son who was very amenable to being taught. As in: “Teach me something. Thanks. Are we done? Can I go now?” He was not an unschooler at that point in his life.

Secondly…well…I’m a teacher. Life is just amazing and fascinating, and I just want to….

BUT. THIS TIME GUYS I MEAN IT.

I told my son that except for math, this would be unschooling time. It would all be up to him. We are going to have conversations about what the typical 7th and 8th grade curricula are all about and how that feeds into the traditional high school model. He may not – and probably will not – do traditional high school – but he needs to know how that is structured and what is generally required for graduation.

It will be my job to facilitate. To find resources, to take him to the library, and so on.

Of course, much of this is determined by his sense of what he wants to do or be. There are people around him who think that music is in his future, but while he wants to keep studying piano, and enjoys it, he is pretty firm that he’s not interested in music as a profession in any way. His vision of himself in the future involves some combination of archaeology, photography and reptiles. We’ll see.

So this is my sense of what “school” will be like for the next year for him:

Aside from his music lessons, homeschool co-op, science center classes, boxing and other activities…what he studies will be up to him, and I’ll help in whatever way I can. The only rule is that he must be engaged in something during the “school day.” It can be outdoors, it can be reading, writing, drawing, studying, talking to me, whatever. But no screens (unless we are watching an educational video together), and if he can’t use his time….I’ll take over.

Today he mentioned Spanish, for example. So I’ll get a Spanish I program of some sort – either middle school Spanish or a high school Spanish I program – and he’ll start on that with the wealth of supplementary materials out there and if he wants to, at some point, involve a tutor or an online class.

This will be very interesting. It will require discipline and self-control on both ends – he’ll need it to stay focused, and I’ll need it in order to keep that Sort Of Unschooling Promise.

Paperwork: As I have mentioned, Alabama is a fabulous homeschooling state. The only requirement is attendance records. No testing, no need to submit curriculum. So our process will be, not planning, but recording.

I have a daily planner, and at the end of every day – or in the course of the day – he will note what he did: what he read, wrote, saw, did. At the end of the week, he’ll write up a summary, and that will be our record-keeping, which I know will be important for future reference, to prove that he actually did things.

4 Responses

Exactly this: “It’s a deal, it’s a contract, it’s an agreement that you, as student and family, make with educational institutions. It’s an agreement in which, for it to be worth it to you, elements must stay balanced.” We struggle with this each time we move to a new place and wind up being pushed towards the preferred school, which may or may not actually fit our needs. We haven’t totally pulled the homeschool trigger (except for pre-K…and even that we’re doing this upcoming year for our twins, even though the parochial school is excellent and has a good program), but have come very close a couple of times. In our last posting, the only reason we didn’t pull the older two in the middle of the year was life had already been disrupted enough, and we didn’t want to further shake things up.

I love reading your thoughts about school and learning and such. It reminds me that I need to sit down and put my planning thoughts onto paper. Or screen as the case may be. This year I’ll have four kids officially school age. Though really Anthony has been doing first grade work for the past year. But this is the calendar year in which he’s six and I officially report him. Bella will be sixth grade and I’m thinking I need to buckle down a bit and give her better lists of things she needs to do every week. Though some of that is more about teaching her to have some discipline about what she’s doing. Because really she’s learning just fine on her own. Except maybe in math. This year I think I need to prioritize socialization. Pre-teen girls seem to need more of that. I’m hoping I can find some peers who are as bookish as she is. Maybe we can organize a book club. Or a sewing or knitting club. Or a bird watching club. Something.

I could not agree more with this radical idea of being able to trust a child to learn. That’s a foundational Charlotte Mason idea — and we’ve become far less unschooly, far more Charlotte-Mason-oriented over the years, though on the ground what we do still looks pretty laid-back. But the idea that somebody, even a little kid has faculties of reason and can understand stuff (“appropriate to his level,” which is kind of key) really seems to come to fruition for me at precisely this weird middle-school stage when they’re so betwixt-and-between. They’re *starting* to be really ready for good meaty books and ideas on a whole new plane, though it’s not the almost-adult plane of high school . . . which I have always loved schooling at home (high school, I mean), because they are such interesting almost-adults.

Funny — I’m an INFP, too. And almost 53 and kind of low-energy (except in writing). I do plan a fairly detailed course of study for my two left at home (8th and 9th grades this year), based on the Mater Amabilis Charlotte Mason program, but with a lot of my own tweaks. But I do virtually no actual teaching — I consider the books to be the teachers, and the student to be the capable learner, whom I’m there to support. I do a lot of reading alongside them and entering into conversation, oral or written. It’s a mode we’ve all been able to live with pretty well, and as the kids have attained this level of independence in their studies, I’ve been able to get writing done pretty consistently, which is a gift.

And Melanie, yeah. Pre-teen girls and socialization. . . though my 13-year-old is and has long been a more typical teenager-type than Bella! She does have a good group of friends, though they’re all spread out over several counties and getting together is always a challenge. As crazed as this fall is promising to be, with a wedding in November, I’m still kind of dying for Irish dance to start back up, to slake the social thirst. 🙂

Setting aside the issues with your school’s educational vision (which is not the norm for the current style of education kids receive these days), the general problem is the social contract is tipped too heavily toward the school.

School has replaced the neighborhood and even the parish. It is now viewed as the center of social life. School daily schedule and calendar drive when a family can vacation, when a family eats breakfast and has dinner, when a family can spend time together. School events overwhelm charitable giving of time, talent and treasure. So even if you liked the vision of the education the school was providing, it’s still crowding out faith and family life.

If schools stopped seeing themselves as the center of childhood, as if they are secondary or replacement families, it would be healthier.

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Badlands, South Dakota August 2019

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